Motivation
I wanted to have two versions of claude-opus-4-5—one with extended thinking enabled and one without:
This doesn't work—the second entry overwrites the first since they share the same key.
After reading the docs, I tried using different keys but couldn't figure out how to keep them pointing to the same underlying model. I had to dig into the source code to discover the id property exists and solves this exact problem.
The gap
The current example in /docs/models shows id but omits name:
Without seeing name in the example, it's not clear that you can fully customize how the model appears in the UI while using id to reference the actual API model.